Voices From Chernobyl

"In Russian, the title reads “A Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future.” It is important to keep in mind that Alexievich calls her book a work of literature, not a work of history. She works in a really impressive fashion, doing about ten years of interviews for each of her books, talking to hundreds of people for hours and hours and really getting to know them. And she often makes composite characters, listing the names of several individuals at the start of a section. She works with her subject’s language, edits, and makes changes to make it beautiful reading as literature. You realise as you read it that most people don’t speak this way—so poetically and with such emotional transparency. The first chapter of her book is about a woman, Lyudmilla Ignatenko. She’s the wife of a fireman who goes off in the middle of the night to fight the fire. She searches for him in the town clinic in the morning, but he’s being rushed off to Moscow. So she stubbornly follows him to Moscow and works her way into the hospital. She stands inside the plastic right by his bedside and stays for weeks while he dies. She’s pregnant. It’s a very touching story that Alexievich has captured. Craig Mazin did a brilliant job reproducing this story in his miniseries on Chernobyl. The child did not survive and because foetuses are so efficient: because the placenta is such a great pathway, much of the radioactivity that came from her exposures was transmitted to the foetus. Developing foetuses with rapidly reproducing cells often have a lot of mutations that can’t be corrected. Alexievich goes on to tell stories of people who lived in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Alexievich is from Belarus and the Belarussians see Chernobyl as their particular tragedy especially. They received the biggest blow of radioactive fallout; a large percentage of the country had some form of Chernobyl contamination fall on it. She tells these stories from the perspective of different people who were assigned to clean up—farmers, scientists. It’s a very beautiful work and I think it gives you the emotional landscape of how people dealt with the anxieties, fears, and health problems that ensued, and their growing sense of disillusionment with their political leaders and the Communist party. The narrative was—and I think, in the 70s and early 80s, people believed it—that they lived in one of the best countries in the world. They had free access to healthcare and education; everybody had a job; they had paid vacations. The Soviets had taken a backwards, rural country and turned it into a modern superpower in just a few decades. Chernobyl really worked to take apart that narrative of success, the pride people had in their country, and the confidence they had in their leaders. Alexievich’s book helps to express that dissolution really well. Yes. In that way, I think it’s priceless. Non-fiction can have trouble getting at that full power of human emotion. Novelists and writers of literary non-fiction can come much closer to it. She worked so closely with people and spent so much time talking to them that she gained their trust. She must have a very low-key interview style where she sits with people and let them reminisce. I do a lot of interviews myself, and you find that often they give a packaged story—‘This is the story I always tell’—but she gets through that and I think comes to the realisation that, as people spoke, they surprised themselves. They came to quite novel and new realisations as they spoke to her. She’s a real genius for getting those stories. She, of course, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Voices from Chernobyl was one of the featured works that helped her win that prize. It is much-deserved. It’s also interesting that both in Russia and Belarus, she was not lionised and celebrated for winning the Nobel Prize. She was treated like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak were treated when they won the Nobel Prize—as if they were somehow traitors to the West."

"I start with this book not just because it was written by the Nobel Prize Laureate —no prize creates a prominent writer, rather such writers’ work is honoured by prizes. Although the book which helped me personally through some of the toughest times was The Unwomanly Face of War , it—as most books written by Svetlana Alexievich —presents the Soviet people in general, while Chernobyl Prayer must have the most of Belarusian voices. Sadly, in some collections it’s marked as ‘ Russian literature .’ In articles about the book, reviewers discuss the ‘Russian state,’ although the Soviet Union consisted of 15 republics, once independent lands and independent again after the dissolution of the USSR. Belarus, that took the biggest toll from the nuclear explosion, is one of them; it wasn’t Russia then and it isn’t now. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter From my personal experience, it seems like most of the people on the planet hadn’t heard of Belarus before the huge post-election protest in 2020, but those who had heard of us, knew about Chernobyl . I’m afraid, in a global picture, Belarus is defined by two things: Chernobyl and dictatorship. However, the Chernobyl disaster was a major event that changed millions of lives. Books like Voices from Chernobyl are written to get people to reflect on such life-changing events, to look at a story of a single person, a simple person, a ‘small’ person under a microscope—to see ourselves in them, and become more compassionate and conscious. That’s what I believe. It takes the form of monologues, and they feel very intimate. People that we hear are brave, wise, and loving. Voices from Chernobyl should be taught in schools, but politicians are not interested in having more compassionate and conscious citizens. They cultivate ignorance. And so these books are read by few, and history repeats itself. On February 24 2022, Russian forces took control over the Chernobyl power plant . I first tried reading this book maybe ten or twelve years ago, and I didn’t move past the prologue. Reading it felt like a torture. The first narrator was telling about her husband Vasya, who worked at a fire station and went to extinguish the fire at the plant on the night of explosion: …at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers—as white film… the colour of his face… his body … blue … red… grey-brown. And it’s all so very mine! It’s impossible to describe! It’s impossible to write down! And even to get over. The only thing that saved me was it happened so fast; there wasn’t any time to think, there wasn’t any time to cry. After these lines I couldn’t keep on reading. I was too young and fragile, and I think you need someone to hug and cry when reading this. “No one talked about the radiation,” Lucya repeats again and again. Silence kills. Our silence kills. The governments, politicians, rich people with power don’t tell us about things they do that affect our lives, but the worst things are done by the hands of simple people in the end, people who were ‘just doing their job,’ as many say when we ask them why, why? The Soviet mentality, which passed on to Russians and Belarusians too, has been that people in power must know best. We hear this argument from common people interviewed on their opinion about the current war in Ukraine, in the streets of Russian cities, and they appear ignorant, as having no critical thinking, blindly trusting Putin . Svetlana Alexievich shows what tragedies such mentality leads to, hoping that people will see it and will work to change so that no more tragedy like that would happen. I believe it’s important to understand the mentality of post-Soviet people, to know what to expect from them and to not be naive about how gladly they will accept democratic values. Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet General Secretary, has written that the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station was “perhaps the main cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse five years later.”"

"What follows events like Chernobyl is a politics of measurement. Who counts? What counts? Who does the counting? How are boundaries drawn for the purposes of counting and comparing? And what is discounted, or never counted at all? On the legacy of Chernobyl and radiation history, I keep tabs on the historian Kate Brown , reading whatever she writes. What I learn from her is that, for all the questions and counting that followed the Chernobyl disaster, there remain gaps and silences — what the sociologist Scott Frickel might call ‘undone science.’ Brown says there hasn’t been sufficient research or research dollars dedicated to effects more subtle than death and of a different category of health troubles than cancers. For example, she points to studies showing correlations (though not causal links) between exposures and heart conditions and also birth defects, and writes about the history of what is and isn’t known about Chernobyl even today, decades on. These gaps, silences, incongruences, and uncertainties are an important piece of what it means to live in this moment. And you’re right, life resumes inside the Exclusion Zone. There is resilience and resolve and also radiation, and all of it makes up life there. Radiation is one part of a bigger story, one mixed and muddled with other exposures, other experiences. But it is the lived experience that I want to focus on, which includes living the questions, the science, the debates over what to study and how to study it. All of this makes up the social experience of a disaster, and of contamination and pollution. To sociologists, the experience of exposure matters as much as the biological exposure. It is an experience that may include being studied—what does that feel like? Or of living with uncertainty; being confused by conflicting reports or duelling experts; of warnings, and overturned warnings; and perhaps most relevant here, to how a government responds to pollution, and by its administration of pollution—how a government goes about the business of remediation, relief, redress and compensation. In his book Everything In Its Path the sociologist Kai Erikson highlights that there’s the primary experience of disaster, or in this case, exposure, and then there are the secondary effects that follow from the official (and unofficial) response to disaster or exposure. These, too, have an effect and after-effects, too. It is the totality –and the diversity—of the lived experience that I want to highlight. It certainly widens what counts as harm. Here, disaster and pollution events are both as singular and spectacular as the explosion, and also drawn-out and accumulative, a slower form of violence , in the scholar Rob Nixon’s parlance, which takes years, perhaps decades to register. She crafted a series of intimate portraits based on hundreds of interviews. Each is in a different voice, and each one is striking, and singularly significant, with visceral imagery that will long stay with you. Reading becomes immersive: you feel and hear and see it, more than simply decoding text. The way disasters unfold against a perfect sky. The way they’re lived in real time — eating at the edges of a normal day, interrupting narratives already in progress, quarrelling lovers, the hanging of washing, the tending to gardens and children — versus how they’re remembered and recorded into history. The messiness of cleanup, and the sacrifices made by those doing it. The experience of a kind of pollution that can’t be seen, that can’t possibly be, not when the apples are sweet and red and ready, not when you’re young and holding the hand of a crush. The accounts build into a polyphonic chorus. Diverse, discordant. “ Reading becomes immersive: you feel and hear and see it, more than simply decoding text. The way disasters unfold against a perfect sky. The way they’re lived in real time. ” I’m always awed when an author crafts a structure for a work that reflects and carries its meaning. She’s done this masterfully. I once read a review, I think it was in the New York Times, how her vignettes accumulate as radioactive particles do. The experiences of Chernobyl, and the state, medical and scientific responses to Chernobyl, building, building, until finally enveloping you."

"Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist, and oral historian. In 2015, she became the first journalist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The wider literary aim of all her books is to capture the lost cultures of Soviet and post-Soviet communities. The Chernobyl power plant was intended to be the world’s largest nuclear power plant, at a time when nuclear energy was seen as having the potential to be a utopian technology for being cheap, efficient, reliable and tremendously powerful—until this catastrophic accident in 1986. The Chernobyl disaster had a devastating impact on the community that was there in terms of all the lives lost and the environment becoming toxic—and with that a whole way of life, a whole cultural memory and way of being in the world. Despite this, some people chose to stay in Chernobyl. Maybe they didn’t understand the risks of staying. Maybe they thought that completely uprooting from all they knew to go somewhere where they would be shunned would just be a different kind of living death and they preferred to stay in the shadow of the blast. Alexievich writes about this book as being a missing history. She explains that by the time she finished writing it, in 1997, hundreds of books on the Chernobyl disaster had already been published. But she wasn’t writing the history of Chernobyl the disaster: she was writing the history of Chernobyl the place, Chernobyl the community, and Chernobyl the culture. She did this by creating a symphony of voices, by interviewing people over years and building up life stories and complex community relationships a thread at a time. It’s this incredibly rich, textured collage that also feels like a series of private, intimate conversations. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Another thing that Alexievich’s literary approach reveals is that when a technological disaster happens, not only does it have an impact on human lives, but human consciousness also changes. She shows the way that the Chernobyl disaster has changed the consciousness of the survivors, as well as the consciousness of everyone around the disaster, including us, the distant observers decades later. She writes about how when something like this happens, the past becomes an archive. It contains nothing to guide you. There’s a sense in which history has stopped and you have no map for what comes next. I find that a powerful way to think about the impact a tech dystopia can have: what comes next is uncharted, and trying to navigate that with no precedent is going to change our consciousness. During and after the Chernobyl disaster, you had people making impossible choices with the consequences not being clear at the time they had to decide. There were times when I had to put the book away, to physically hide it in a desk drawer for a while, because it felt so frightening. Quite early on in the book, Alexievich interviewed a woman whose husband had been a fireman at the plant. He was dying of radiation exposure, and she begged to be allowed to sit with him and care for him. When she was trying to feed him, he was coughing, and she realized that he was coughing up his lungs. She was trying to spoon away his lungs from the corners of his mouth. No one should ever have to be in that situation. The book’s terrific. Did you see the TV adaptation ? I’m guessing they didn’t include that scene because it’s so disturbing, but it’s the very first story in the book—you can’t hide from it. When she was gently wiping flecks of lung away from his mouth, I just thought, I can’t cope with this. But that’s exactly it—no one’s prepared for that. She wasn’t prepared for it either, or for how her consciousness would change in response. The medical staff warn her off, saying things like ‘This is not your husband anymore, this is not a person anymore.’ And she just repeats ‘I love him,’ and sneaks into the ward so that she can hold him and care for him as he dies, though she knows it might kill her. And all the medical staff who warned her off die from their own radiation exposure. Alexievich, too, keeps returning to Chernobyl to do these interviews, and tell these stories, though it might kill her. It would have been easy to write about Chernobyl in a way that made us feel awe about the powerful technology, but instead Alexievich makes us feel awe about human nature, and our capacity to create darkness and light at the same time. I think Nietzsche would have approved."